• imPower Technologies Embraces Switch to Online Learning

  April 8, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Traditional schools around the world are in turmoil as a result of the COVID-19 lockdown and the sudden switch to online learning. For Jim Buck and his new IBM i training venture, imPower Technologies, the sudden popularity of virtual education validates the work he and his colleagues have done to build an Internet-based IBM i education operation.

  “We’ve been preparing for this unknowingly for years now,” imPower Technologies Chief Operating Officer Michelle Lyons says. “Had we known, we couldn’t have prepared better.”

  Buck and Lyons started building imPower Technologies nearly three years ago to provide an online vehicle to deliver …

  Read more

• Exploring ALL400s In Tableau

  April 8, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Those who love maps and the IBM i platform will get a kick out John Rockwell’s latest trick: an aerial view of the IBM i installed base through the lens of Tableau’s interactive BI software. And even if you have no particular predilection for geography, the ability to drill down into details and statistics of the IBM i populace is worth a look anyway.

  Rockwell, of course, is the steward of ALL400s, the list of IBM i shops that Rockwell started assembling back in 2005. The list contains the names of nearly 48,700 organizations that currently run or previously …

  Read more

• Four Hundred Monitor, April 8

  April 8, 2020 Jenny Thomas

  The lockdown continues and while it may seem like everything has come to a screeching halt, the world is still spinning and businesses are carrying on as best as they can. Take IBM, for instance. The plan for introducing us to its new CEO has been in the works for some time, and pandemic or not, it came time for Arvind Krishna to take the reins. And on April 6, he did exactly that, and started the day with a letter, which you can see at the first link in the Top Stories From Outside The Jungle section below. Before …

  Read more

• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 22, Number 14

  April 8, 2020 Doug Bidwell

  We hope you are well out there in IBM iLand during the Great Infection. These are tough times, but we can get through it together. The PTF updates are a little skimpy this week, and that is just as well with people having plenty of other things on their mind.

  And here is the rundown by IBM i release:

  PTF Groups 7.4

  • QMGTOOLS

  PTF Groups 7.3

  • QMGTOOLS

  PTF Groups 7.2

  • QMGTOOLS

  PTF Groups 7.1

  • Nothing here to see here

  New (or Updated) Links this week:

  • ACS: Missing IBM i ACS 5250 Menu Bar
  • TLS: How to Enable TLS for the

  …

  Read more

• Big Blue Changes Gears Slightly With IBM i TR Plan

  April 6, 2020 Alex Woodie

  The coronavirus has infected over a million people around the globe and forced hundreds of millions of employees to work from home. But it won’t stop IBM from announcing the next batch of Technology Refreshes, ostensibly IBM i version 7.4 TR2 and IBM i version 7.3 TR8, sometime in the next couple of weeks. Its plans for sharing the information, however, have changed.

  IBM has essentially shuttered its lab in Rochester, Minnesota, which falls under that state’s social distancing orders to help prevent the spread of the virus that causes COVID-19. More than 80 percent of the United States is …

  Read more

• The IT Sector Could Weather The Pandemic Storm

  April 6, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It has been a rough couple of weeks for absorbing exponential data. It is astounding has fast the Great Infection, my term for the combination of the coronavirus outbreak and the reprise of the Great Recession that it looks like it is causing, is upon us. Nearly 10 million people have lost their jobs in two weeks, and my guess is that will more than double again next week and keep building from there, perhaps quadruple until we go from 3.5 percent unemployment in the United States to maybe 15 percent or so.

  The hope is that this is temporary, …

  Read more

• Guru: SQL Checks For Control Breaks

  April 6, 2020 Ted Holt

  A control break occurs when the combined value of one or more fields changes from one row (record) to the next when reading a data set sequentially. I used to write RPG programs with control breaks often. Now that reports are less common, I write them less often, but that’s not to say I never write a program with control breaks.

  When I first learned to handle control breaks in RPG, I used the L1 through L9 level indicators. These worked wonderfully and fed my family for several years. When I moved from the System/36 world to the S/38 (and …

  Read more

• Unperspective: To Which Side Do You Belong?

  April 6, 2020 Trevor Perry

  I recently presented one of my motivational life/work balance keynote sessions to a small group. If you’ve attended one of my sessions, you’ll know I hand out crayons and paper for audiences. We use these to engage the audience in drawing and writing (poetry), with a simple premise – now you are an artist and a writer. You came to my session with fewer skills than when you left.

  Of course, there are many audience members who grumble about the concept of being “forced” to use a crayon – after all, crayons are for kids. It’s an opportunity to point …

  Read more

• Final IBM i Software Maintenance Price Increases Released

  April 6, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in early March, we told you that Big Blue was getting set to raise the prices it charges for Software Maintenance, short-handed down to SWMA and pronounced “swamma.” We had some estimated pricing, and on March 30, in an updated announcement letter 320-089, IBM released the updated price increases.

  They are a bit different from the pricing that we saw in IBM’s initial presentations warning customers about the price increase, and the updated announcement has a spreadsheet that shows all of the different SKUs for SWMA for the P05, P10, P20, P30, P40, P50, and P60 software tiers. …

  Read more

• Sending Your IT Department To The Teledoctor For A Checkup

  March 30, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Quite a few of us in the world are going to have experience with telemedicine in the coming weeks, if we have not had it already, and so barriers to providing medical service are going to come down. The same kind of remote health experience is available for IT departments from a relatively new company called Chordia Consulting, which has created a remote IT healthcheck that now has a variant tuned specifically for IBM i shops and their special characteristics.

  And in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak, Chordia’s co-founders, both ex-IBMer’s with experience in the IBM midrange, are …

  Read more

Previous Articles Next Articles